Anupam Kher on Bollywood’s dismal box-office in 2024: Hindi cinema is struggling

The year 2024 has been a little disappointing at the box office for Hindi films, with barring a few successes, most films failed to do well. Actor Anupam Kher, who completed 40 years in the industry this year and gave an OTT film which received praise Vijay 69, asks the industry to self-reflect in this scenario.
He says, “Going to cinema is an outing that a person does with their family, so you have to improve the quality of cinema because you are competing with streaming platforms and the millions of sources of entertainment in the world. Why don’t we raise our bar?” The actor adds that the biggest challenge for the industry right now is storytelling: “India is such a huge country, and we are not telling our stories. Hindi cinema is still struggling to tell stories which are from our lands. Most stories you feel you have seen it somewhere, sometimes even the sequences are already seen in other films. The best way to reinvent yourself is to look back and look inside.”
Ask him if OTT is become a safer space in this scenario with theatricals proving to be a risky choice and Anupam Kher says, “I have been in films for 40 years now. Every time we blamed something’s rise for theatrical not doing well, but cinema is still going on. When VHS came or TV became commercial, people were like films will die, but it didn’t happen. With OTT, the same thing happened. But what OTT has done is it has created jobs for a lot of people and improved the quality of content.”
Taking example of his latest outing, Anupam asserts, “What makes Vijay 69 different is that it is a completely original script. Kahin pe bhi pehle kuch nahi dekha hai. There is no unnecessary high speed shot or slo-mos. It’s about a human story.” But he does defend theatricals too. “Hindi cinema also has to cater to the audiences of many languages—be it Malayalam, Telugu or Gujarati. But it’s high time we write stories where people say ‘yes, we want to go to the theatres and watch this film’,” he ends.